California Forum of the Lacanian Field

We are a collective of clinicians, artists, and academics engaged with psychoanalysis as
practiced and theorized by Jacques Lacan in his return to Freud and beyond.

We have worked together in the space of a forum that is linked to an international network, the
International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field. Our forum was founded in 2012 by a group of
members based in the Los Angeles area, but the online era has given us the chance to work with
colleagues around the world.

Our forum aims to establish a continuous space for the transmission of Lacanian psychoanalysis
and to promote its expansion as a practice of speech in California in collaboration with the
International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field and its School of Psychoanalysis. Our activities
are mostly open and free, accessible through Zoom, and targeted to a local audience.

The International of the Forums is a federation of forums from different parts of the world. It
was born in 1998 from a split within the School of the Freudian Cause, a school of
psychoanalysis generated from the Freudian School of Paris founded by Jacques Lacan.
Although the forums form an international network, they maintain local governance under the
democratic rule and are guided by the principles of support for individual initiatives and
solidarity between its members.

Within the international federation, the forums are grouped in zones. The California forum takes
part in the English-speaking zone along with other forums in the US, Australia, England, New
Zealand, and Israel.

The forums aim to bring psychoanalysis beyond the couch. They question what is said in the
name of psychoanalysis and promote both the articulation with social and political practices
that confront the symptoms of our times and the interlocution with other forms of theoretical praxis.
They differ from the School of Psychoanalysis, dedicated to deal with questions pertaining to
the psychoanalytic treatment in the context of the formation of the analyst. The forums have
their own School of Psychoanalysis and work interdependently with it as the analytical
discourse brought into the social link by the forums is sustained by the act of the psychoanalyst.
In other words, the forums act as a hinge between the School of Psychoanalysis and the
extended social links.

The heterogeneity of California forum member’s backgrounds and practices (clinics, teaching,
art, research) shapes transference from members towards psychoanalysis and between
themselves in different ways. The forum is the common space for the members to interrogate
current cultural and clinical practices from the discourse of the analysand, creating
opportunities for the transmission of psychoanalysis.